Computer Ties Human on Jeopardy!

IBM’s Watson freaks out viewers and finishes round one of the trivia show tied with former champion Brad Rutter.

It’s gotta sting for Ken Jennings. His sole claim to fame is winning Jeopardy! 74 times in a row, and now he’s being bested by an inanimate object. After round one of a three-episode contest, the computer known as Watson was tied with Brad Rutter at $5,000 and Jennings was lagging behind at $2,000. The computer’s engineers say Watson is not just a memory bank of possible trivia answers; it recognizes human language and follows several lines of reasoning at once to arrive at a possible conclusion. While the computer’s performance was impressive there were several glitches and at one point it gave an answer already given by another contestant. Round two of man vs. machine airs tonight.